More tourists are visiting Western Australia, but despite a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign, the tourism industry is still struggling to get them to stay longer and convince international visitors to spend more money, new figures show.

Key points:

WA had more international visitors, but they spent $166m less in the past year

The Tourism Council says WA can't afford to market itself overseas and domestically

WA has to compete for tourists against the entire eastern states

In the 12 months from September 2017 to September 2018, the number of international visitors to the state marginally increased by 6,000, representing a 0.6 per cent year-on-year rise.

But despite this overall growth in visitor numbers, the total amount of money they spent in WA fell by $166 million, or 6.8 per cent.

Tourism Minister Paul Papalia told ABC Radio Perth much of the blame for that fall in spending could be attributed to a drop in accommodation prices in the state.

He said in years gone by accommodation made up a much larger portion of a visitor's overall spend.

But he said the fall in hotel prices would make the state attractive and help remove the pricy reputation WA earned during the mining boom.

Tourism Council WA chief executive Evan Hall said the disparity in growth and decline of spending between international and interstate visitors showed Tourism WA was struggling to balance a limited budget.

"The real challenge that we have is that Tourism WA's marketing budget isn't enough to grow visitation from both the interstate and the international markets," he said.

"While their marketing has been quite effective in the interstate [market], and we've clawed back some of the losses there, we simply don't have enough funding to be effectively marketing into Germany and the UK, Singapore and Malaysia.

"Every time we try and boost one market it comes at the expense of another."

WA vs the eastern states

Mr Hall said he would like to see the Government commit more funding to tourism and warned WA was being outpaced by tourism campaigns coming out of the eastern states, a point on which Mr Papalia agreed.

"Well I'm not surprised that Evan Hall and the Tourism Council are asking for more funding for tourism, that's a good thing. They're the advocates for the industry and they always do that," he said.

"But what he's saying is that we're being outspent by the eastern states and that's true.

"We're essentially one market, up against another market which is the entire eastern seaboard, and we're never going to match them.

"If anyone flies to Sydney they're very likely to go up and down the eastern seaboard."

Mr Papalia said WA would likely never outspend the combined east coast tourism budgets, but Tourism WA was working on targeted campaigns to set WA apart from the other states.

"We've got to be very clever and targeted and focused on trying to drive visitors to Western Australia as their first point of entry rather than to the eastern states, because very seldom will they go to both sides," he said.

Tourism WA managing director Brodie Carr said there were positives to take from the latest visitor survey results but they also indicated work was still needed.

"We're really happy with the total number of people and the growth in the numbers of people who are coming, we need to focus on getting them to stay longer and to spend more," he said.

"But we need to be careful, we need to make sure these trends are quarter, on quarter, on quarter, so they're a long term trend and it's not just a spike."

Mr Papalia said the international tourism marketing effort had been boosted by locking in direct flights from Perth to London and the launching of All Nippon Airways flights from Perth to Tokyo from September.

He said establishing direct flights from Perth to Shanghai and cities within India were next on the list.

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